Weekends reads and getting festive...

Countdown to my winter holiday break! My workplace closes next Tuesday for a week, so I'm really looking forward to that.  I've got a massive holiday break reading queue in the works, starting with...

My weekend read is Mistress of the Wind by Michelle Diener. I'm an enormous fan of Diener's work, so I can't wait to see how she handles fantasy and a retelling of a favorite fairy tale of mine, East of the Sun, West of the Moon.

I've just finished two really fantastic books I can't squee about -- I'm blurbing them for Bloggers Recommend so you'll find out a little after the first. Then I'll be shouting about them nonstop.

I hope to get my top ten reads of 2013 posted on the 30th -- am still struggling with whittling down the list to ten!

What are you reading this weekend?

Comments

  1. I am very glad they Tuesday is a holiday so there are 3 days off, and I took the rest of too ;)

    ReplyDelete

  2. Looking forward to your top ten of 2013 post! And, the books you want to 'squee' about! ;) Your Sony reader (am I correct?) looks so cool. I love the red, but I dare not purchase yet another e-reader being the owner of three generations of nooks with a kindle paperwhite arriving just today. I'm rather embarrassed, yet it is cheaper than a nightly bottle of wine, is it not? :)

    ReplyDelete

  3. Hope you've enjoyed your break!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Image
First line: Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond.

I had to grit my teeth to get through this book. (All 209 pages.)

I'm ashamed to admit this since a surprising number of folks online and in person have cited this novella as one of their favorite books, but I found everything about this brief read to be agonizing -- the plot, the narrative style, the characters -- it and I just did not connect.

I went in expecting to love this book given its reputation and subject matter. Achebe depicts the story of a Nigeria broken by white colonialism; our hero is deeply flawed and stubbornly committed, living in a world with problems triply complicated by the unnecessary influence of white colonizers. Achebe's narrative style is straight-forward and clear, even as he articulates a world deeply foreign to modern audiences.

I suspect I didn't understand this book; I'm also not a huge fan of tragedies (I loathe Hamlet) so Okonkwo as a character didn'…
Read more

Book Review: Basic Black with Pearls by Helen Weinzweig

Image
First line: Night comes as a surprise in the tropics.

It took me less than a month, but more than two weeks, to read this brief novel; it's incredibly interior-oriented, which isn't a bad thing, but it didn't allow for lazy, quick reading. Our narrator, Shirley, is clever, and you can't be sloppy to keep up with her.

The feel of this novel is Erica Jong meets Kate Chopin. Shirley is a smart, passionate 40-something housewife who travels the world meeting her spy lover.

But their latest tryst takes her back to Toronto, where she grew up and still lives, and as we watch Shirley attempt to untangle the clues that will connect her with her lover, we start to wonder just how much of this might be real.

And yet, that's not precisely the point of this novel. In her pursuit of her lover, we're exposed to Shirley's entire life -- her childhood, her marriage, her anxieties and hopes -- and a complicated-but-familiar portrait emerges. By the end, I found myself wantin…
Read more

Book Review: Only Human by Sylvain Neuvel

Image
First line: --Central, this is Lapetus. Target in sight.

This is the final novel in the Themis Files trilogy (I reviewed the previous two novels, Sleeping Giants and Waking Gods.) 

I'm not going to summarize the plot because I don't want to end up spoiling anything. As a concluding novel, it did everything I needed a final book to do: wrapped up plot threads, answered the mysteries, and provided some final flash bang.

As with his previous novels, I think some of Neuvel's characterizations are thin -- no doubt because the story is told through transcripts and journal entries -- and it left me a little impatient with the story.

These were fast reads, so if you want a Michael Bay-esque summer action flick in a book, this trilogy will do it.

Title:Only Human
Author: Sylvain Neuvel
Genre: Fiction (Sci Fi / Speculative / Mecha / Aliens / Parenthood / Social Commentary / Warfare)
Publisher/Publication Date: Del Rey (5/1/2018)
Source: Edelweiss

Read more